


The Answers to the Unknown

by Zangoose



Category: Gravity Falls, Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 17:41:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2820695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zangoose/pseuds/Zangoose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>25 years after their journey into the Unknown, Greg is taking Wirt to cherished vacation town of Gravity Falls for his birthday. But Greg can't let go of those mysterious woods, and Wirt knows it. After Wirt offhandedly mentions it to 12 year old Dipper Pines, Dipper rushes to check his journal to make sure his hunch is true. Sure enough, the author himself set out to find the mysteries of the Unknown, and with Wirt and Greg's help, maybe Dipper and Mabel can continue the author's work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Back to the Falls

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, okay, I don't usually write down my crazy fic ideas but I started connecting a few too many dots and this sort of happened. In this, I'm approximating that Wirt was 15 in the show and Greg was 8, and that OtGW took place in 1989 or so. Also, I kind of skipped over the fact that Gravity falls takes place in 2012 and set it in 2014 instead on accident, so my math doesn't add up well there. Anyway, hope you enjoy.

“Wirt, seriously, you need to relax.” Greg glanced at his half-brother, then returned his gaze to the road. “This is my birthday present to you!”

“Oh joy, a trip to that lame place your dad always took us, how exciting.” Wirt rolled his eyes. “I’m turning 40, not 4.”

“I wasn’t even alive when you were 4.”

“Thank God.”

Greg scowled at him. “Look, I know we haven’t talked much since…”

“Since you ruined my wedding with your weird conspiracy theories?”

“It’s not a conspiracy theory!” His foot went down on the pedal a bit more. “The Unknown was and is real, Wirt.”

“It was a shared delusion.”

“That doesn’t explain why Jason Funderburker still had Lorna’s bell in his stomach!”

Wirt shook his head. “Maybe the mysterious light in the frog’s stomach is what caused that part of the delusion in the first place.”

Greg pulled up to the decrepit Mystery Shack and parked. He turned his full attention to his brother with a sigh. “Please, just… I wanted to do something special for you to try to make up for it. It’s your birthday afterall and I miss how close we were.”

Wirt tried not to look, but the pleading eyes of his younger brother made him cave. “Alright. One weekend in Gravity Falls won’t kill me, I guess.” He turned his attention to the older man waving his cane and speaking to tourists. “But I refuse to let that hack convince me to buy anything.”

“That’s the spirit!” Greg stepped out of the car, already feeling much more optimistic about the trip.


	2. Mystery _hack

Inside the Mystery Shack, Mabel Pines shoved a sweater on Waddles.

“There you go! Festive!” The young girl threw confetti in the air, confetti that match the sewn on confetti that decorated the pig’s new outfit. Grenda and Candy clapped excitedly.

Dipper shook his head, smiling.

Wendy elbowed him. “Hey, do you think Mabel would make an ugly Christmas sweater for me? Every year we have a contest at school and with one of her sweaters, I’m sure to win.”

Dipper scratched behind his head. “I dunno… Mabel doesn’t think any of her sweaters are ugly and it doesn’t really seem…”

“Excuse me,” Dipper was interrupted by a young man holding a rock with a face painted on it. “How much for this?”

Dipper blinked. “Um, isn’t there a sticker on the back?”

He turned over the rock and smiled. “So there is. Five dollars seems a little excessive, but I’ll take it. Reminds me of a rock I had as a kid.”

Wendy rang up the customer without so much as a fake smile. “Here ya go.”

Dipper gave him a weird look. “You had a rock as a kid?”

“You didn’t?” He smiled at the young boy.

“Greg, are you serious?” Wirt came up from his less-than-enthusiastic browsing. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna-”

Greg smiled. “Rock facts!” He used the same distorted voice he did when he was eight.

Wirt couldn’t help fut shake his head and laugh. “Wow.”

“It’ll be like old times, you’ll see. Hey, if we find a blue cape, red pointed hat, and tea kettle, we could go hiking through the woods like old times.” 

Wirt’s smile disappeared. “I thought we were going to discuss it.”

“Oh c’mon, Wirt…”

Wendy and Dipper turned to each other, stifling a laugh. Wirt glared at them.

“Do you two have a problem with my name?”

Dipper shook his hands in front of him defensively. “No, no… I mean, I thought Dipper was a weird name…”

Greg turned his attention to the girl with a pig.

“You put a sweater on a pig?”

“Yep!” She grinned with a mouthful of braces.

Greg grinned back. “Did you make that sweater yourself?”

“Sure did.”

He glanced back at his brother, still discussing names with the young boy. He pulled out his wallet. 

“Tell you what, I’ll pay you twenty bucks to make two sweaters with this rock on it,” he held up his newly purchased rock, “with the words ‘And that’s a rock fact’ with an exclamation point at the end.”

Her eyes lit up. “Really? You want to pay me to make you a sweater?” 

“Yep. But keep it a secret.” He put his hand up as if to block what he was saying from Wirt. “It’s gonna be my brother’s birthday present.”

“Matching sweaters for you and your brother?” Mabel started bouncing. “For that, I’ll do it for free!”

Candy and Grenda stepped forward. “And we’ll help!”

Greg beamed. “Wow, you girls sure are amazing. Reminds me of when I was a kid.”

Meanwhile, Dipper was still arguing with a 40 year old Wirt.

“And what was that your brother was saying about a blue cape and a tea kettle?”

Wirt waved it off. “Oh, those were our halloween costumes years ago.”

Dipper blinked. “You wandered the woods in your halloween costumes?” Once he said it out loud he realized it didn’t seem too weird to think that young stupid boys would wander the woods on halloween.

“No, not really. That was the halloween we almost died because I was a nervous wreck around my future wife.”

Wendy perked up. “Whoa, what?” She turned to Dipper. “Sounds kind of like you, Dipper.”

Dipper almost said something, but they had almost died quite a bit that summer, and a few times because he was a nervous wreck around Wendy.

Wendy turned back to Wirt. “So what happened?”

Wirt rolled his eyes. “Oh, a bunch of the teenagers went to the cemetery and Greg and I followed because I had put a tape in Sara’s pocket, which admittedly was a stupid idea to begin with, but the cops showed up and we jumped the wall, a train almost hit us and we rolled down the hill into the river.”

Wendy and Dipper blinked in awe. 

“And then we shared this weird dream about this place called ‘The Unknown’ until I woke up long enough to pull us out of the water and the search team found us and took us to the hospital.”

Dipper shook his head. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. ‘The Unknown’?”

Wirt sighed. “Yeah, it was weird and Greg has been obsessed with it ever since. He keeps saying it was real.”

An alarm went off on Wendy’s phone. “Whoops, lunch break.” She stood and walked to the door, waving to Dipper. “See you tomorrow, dude.”

Dipper nervously waved back. “Yeah, see ya…”

Wirt stared at the door. “Didn’t she just say ‘lunch break’? Why is she leaving for the day…”

Dipper shrugged. “She’s a teenager, she does whatever she wants.”

“All right.” Wirt shook his head and glanced over at Greg, who was letting the three girls put hair ties in his rather shaggy brown hair. “We should probably get going to check into our hotel. Greg!”

Greg and the girls looked up. He frowned. “Sorry girls, I guess I have to get going.” He shook his hair free of the ties and barrettes. He whispered to Mabel. “Don’t forget the sweaters, okay? I’ll pick them up on our way out of town.”

Mabel saluted. “No problem, Sir Gregory!”

Greg saluted back, then left with his brother. 

Wirt gave him a weird look as they got in the car. “Kinda creepy how you were hanging out with those girls.”

“They wanted to play with my hair; it’s not like I could say no to such sweethearts! And did you see her pig?”

Wirt rolled his eyes.


	3. The Author

Dipper yanked Mabel away from her friends and up to their room. 

“Mabel, you’re never going to believe this.” He pulled out his treasured journal and flipped it open to a seemingly boring page.

“The journal? I’ve seen it like a bajillion times Dipper.”

“No, the guy that was just in the shack, he mentioned ‘The Unknown’.”

Mabel cocked her head to the side. “‘The Unknown’?”

Dipper pointed to the page. Right above his finger were the words ‘The Unknown’.

“The author knew about the Unknown. In fact, he infers that his search for the Unknown is what led him to Gravity Falls in the first place.” Dipper read directly from the entry.

“After years of being side-tracked, I finally uncovered my first concrete evidence of the Unknown’s existence. Unfortunately, the only real evidence of it being a real place mysteriously vanished, as well as the woman’s memory of the event.

“Kelly Smith, age 23, was a tourist who fell and hit her head. Upon her awakening at the hospital, she told of a forest and several small villages, a woodsman and even the beast. In fact, she even mentioned my own great, great, great, great grandmother, Beatrice, as a talking bluebird in search of lost friends. Whilst in the Unknown, Smith apparently became a point of affection to a young man who gave her a bracelet to remember him by. When she described the bracelet, the nurses made a point not to mention that it had been among her belongings when she was found, though no previous pictures from the day she fell had the bracelet around her wrist. I was going to take the bracelet myself to analyze, but I was almost caught and had to flee. When I came back, the bracelet had disappeared, and the woman claimed not to know what I was talking about.”

Mabel put her enclosed hands up to her head, then exploded them outward with the appropriate ‘mind blown’ sound effects.

“Don’t you see what this means, Mabel? Those two guys have then next piece of the puzzle that even the author didn’t have! They’ve actually been to the Unknown!”

Mabel gasped. “And I need to get started on those sweaters!”

Dipper blinked a few times in confusion as his sister popped up and began gathering sweater-making supplies. “Mabel, aren’t you even the slightest bit intrigued? This is big!”

“Of course I am. Why do you think I’m putting a rush order on the sweaters?”

“Uh…”

“So we have an excuse to snoop and get information from him, you doofus! Now hand me that blue thread.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I wrote the first three chapters in one sitting, sorry if it takes a bit to get the next few up. I'm really excited about this though!


End file.
